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Cisco® Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP) is an award-winning product that provides IP-based self-service and call routing. It combines open-standards support for speech with intelligent application development and industry-best call control to deliver personalized self-service to callers - either as a standalone interactive-voice-response (IVR) system or transparently integrated with a contact center.

Business Value

With Cisco Unified CVP, businesses and organizations can provide incoming callers with automated, intelligent self-service using touch-tone input or speech recognition. Callers can access and modify their accounts, place orders, get status updates, retrieve information, and resolve problems - all without speaking to a live agent. This paradigm results in dramatic savings in agent costs. However, if an agent's services are required, Cisco Unified CVP can queue the call and then transfer it to an agent - along with information about the caller and the self-service session. With this solution agent productivity improves and customers enjoy a smooth service experience.

Cisco Unified CVP is an IP-based system, but it easily interoperates with traditional telephony networks through voice gateways using open-standards VoiceXML. These same voice gateways serve as VoiceXML browsers under the control of Cisco Unified CVP, allowing them to play announcements, collect information, and queue calls. The architecture of Cisco Unified CVP provides distributed call treatment with centralized application management, allowing calls to receive self-service and queuing at the most efficient (or desirable) location, while still enabling consistent branding and caller experience, and easy application updates.

When self-service or queuing is complete, Cisco Unified CVP uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based call control to instruct the network where to route the call, possibly reducing or eliminating telephony carrier transfer costs. The ability of Cisco Unified CVP to route calls across customer service sites enables resource virtualization, allowing businesses and organizations to lower their costs significantly by reducing the number of agents required to maintain a given service level. For example, a customer might call a local office and if no agents are free there, Cisco Unified CVP can easily route the call to a different site where an agent is available.

Cisco Unified CVP is especially powerful when used as part of the broader portfolio of Cisco Unified Communications Solutions, because it takes full advantage of the superior capabilities of Cisco routers and session border controllers (SBCs).

Table 1 lists the new features and benefits available in Cisco Unified CVP 10.5.

●Introduction of debugging break points, which can suspend the debug flow at designated nodes to verify inputs and outputs, and navigate through call flows using debug commands

●Support for sub-flows, which enables the creation of reusable modules across applications and gives application writers the flexibility of independent module development

●Event handlers in Cisco Unified CVP Studio applications to handle VoiceXML events and Java exceptions at the most appropriate place within the call flow. Exception events are mapped to more context-specific errors to provide better information to troubleshooters

●Throwing and handling of custom events to simplify context passing between application modules, in a loosely-coupled manner

Cisco Unified CVP can play prerecorded announcements and prompts to callers, supporting a wide variety of informational and self-service applications. Streaming audio is also supported (with Real-Time Streaming Protocol [RTSP]), allowing play of live audio sources.

Cisco Unified CVP supports audio-based self-service and queuing for calls, which optionally become video calls when routed to a contact center agent. This support provides rich caller‑agent interactions while saving costs and bandwidth during the self-service portion of the call.

Video in queue

The Cisco Unified CVP video-in-queue feature allows a video caller on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) to view a high-definition (HD) video prompt and navigate a video menu using dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) keys while in queue for a video agent. This feature allows businesses and organizations to provide personalized, “high-touch” services to customers at remote and branch-office sites such as a local bank office or a retail store.

In addition to its self-service and queuing capabilities, Cisco Unified CVP possesses powerful SIP-based call control to instruct the IP network where to route the call. This control can include call transfer to an agent, IVR, ACD, PBX, or a carrier network, providing a wealth of customer service options. Cisco Services and authorized Cisco Advanced Technology Partners can assist with integrations to specific devices and carrier networks.

Computer telephony integration (CTI)

Cisco Unified CVP can transfer the call to an agent along with CTI information about the caller and the caller’s self-service session. This feature improves agent productivity and results in a smoother customer service experience. CTI data can be passed either through Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) or directly to SIP-enabled devices through the SIP message header.

Carrier interoperability

Testing and certification have been performed with Cisco Unified CVP and the following telephony carrier call-transfer mechanisms:

●*8

●Two B-Channel Transfer (TBCT)

●ATT's IP Trunking

SIP

Information about the call and caller can be provided to the agent in the SIP header, speeding problem resolution.

Support for Cisco Unified SIP Proxy improves solution redundancy by enabling dynamic reroute around an endpoint that is down.

Cisco Unified CVP supports SIP trunks with mu-law and a-law encoding.

Cisco Unified CVP supports a range of SIP RFCs to enable powerful, comprehensive, and efficient control over calls. Some of the major RFCs supported include:

Cisco Unified CVP can route calls based on trunk group and endpoint availability, improving call-completion rates and providing trunk reporting.

Locations-Based Call Admission Control (LBCAC)

LBCAC enables you to control the audio quality and video quality of calls over a wide-area (IP WAN) link by limiting the number of calls that are allowed on that location at the same time. Enhanced LBCAC bandwidth calculations are more accurate, and the feature can now select a local VoiceXML gateway for voice-response-unit (VRU) treatment at the branch office during warm transfers from an agent.

Agent greeting

A configurable, automated agent greeting can be played to callers, standardizing the caller experience. The agent greeting helps to keep agents’ voices fresh by saving them from having to repeat the same greeting on every call.

Agent whisper

A configurable announcement can be played to an agent right before the caller is connected, providing information about the type of call being delivered (for example, "sales" or "tech support") and other guidance. This feature gives agents information about the caller, speeding problem handling and improving first-call resolution.

Architecture

Scalability

Cisco Unified CVP is extremely scalable, supporting deployments from as small as 24 ports (a single T1) to as large as 15,000 ports.

Gateway VoiceXML browsers

Cisco Unified CVP interoperates with voice gateways using open-standards VoiceXML, allowing it to instruct the gateways to play announcements, collect information, and queue calls. Gateways can be deployed essentially anywhere on the network, allowing self-service and queuing to occur at the most efficient and cost-effective location.

The router consolidates the Cisco Unified CVP Voice Browser with other network functions on a single server, reducing hardware and support requirements.

Network queuing

The ability of the application to treat and queue calls on network gateways helps businesses and organizations achieve higher customer service levels by virtualizing resources across multiple sites. For example, a customer might call the local Boston office and if no agents are free there, Cisco Unified CVP can easily route the call to a different site where an agent is available.

Failover

The distributed architecture of the application provides robust failover capabilities. For example, if a network gateway is taken out of service, subsequent calls can be immediately routed to a different gateway for treatment.

Unified system CLI enables you to collect diagnostic (health and status) information about Cisco Unified CVP servers and to collect device-specific information from each supported node connected to the Cisco Unified CVP server from which you are using the unified system CLI.

Simplified configuration and administration

The representational state transfer (REST) APIs for service fulfillment (for example, media files and VoiceXML scripts) and service assurance (for example, syslog configurations and SNMP alerts) provide easy manageability of VoiceXML applications and media files across the network and simplify the configuration of syslog and SNMP alerts.

Reporting

Reporting database

A built-in reporting database enables businesses and organizations to create their own Cisco Unified CVP reports using third-party tools.

Cisco Services adapt to market changes while increasing productivity, improving competitive advantage, and delivering a rich-media experience across any workspace.

The combined strengths of Cisco and our partners provide a portfolio of services that can help you prepare your infrastructure for future changes aligning to long-term business goals.

Together we create innovative, network-centric architecture solutions resulting in a scalable and responsive foundation that can help you realize the full value of your IT and communication investment.

Cisco Unified CVP Advanced Technology Partners (ATPs) have completed rigorous training and validation of their knowledge of the product and can offer customers some or all of the following capabilities:

The Cisco Developer Network program offers a formalized means for developers to certify value-added applications and solutions for use with Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal. Information about Cisco Developer Network partners is available at: https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog. Under "Find a Solution/Service By" choose "Technology", then "Contact Center Applications" (in the left drop-down box), and click "Find Solution".